{3:50 minutes to read} An ethical bribe/lead magnet is a resource that is offered on your website for free—valuable enough to the reader that they are willing to give their email address to get it.
That being said, why would you use such a tactic?
Well, if you’ve done word-of-mouth marketing online to gain a visitor to your website or blog, what’s the next step? You always want to have a call-to-action. In many cases, people are not ready to make a decision on your services right away. So you want to have the opportunity to stay in touch with them (with their permission) and reinforce your potential value to them & your status as a Branded Expert™.
To context this, have you ever been to a website that has asked you to hand over your email address in exchange for a valuable newsletter, a free membership, an e-book, PDF, or something else that you may perceive as valuable? This is an ethical bribe.
The offer needs to be compelling, or it won’t work very well, because a lot of people don’t want to be on a lot of mailing lists. But if you have somebody to your website, and you’re in professional services, it’s highly likely they have an interest in what you are doing, whether that be for themselves or a friend/colleague.
In terms of how an ethical bribe works on a website, there are multiple parts. The first thing you want to do is make sure that, on every page of your website and in your newsletter, etc., you put some sort of teaser call to action. A line or two with a compelling headline, just like you would for your blog post, stating why they might want to get more in-depth information about a particular subject.
Clicking through would land them on what we call a teaser page, which would have some sample or excerpt of whatever it is that you’re offering: the report, mistakes to avoid, etc. To really kick it up a notch, have some positive opinions or testimonials for the content itself on that teaser page.
Let’s say you create an article on Mistakes to Avoid When…as your ethical bribe. You want a teaser page that has an excerpt of the article’s content (say one of the mistakes & how to avoid it) and short testimonials for how valuable this insightful article is. These testimonials can be gotten from close friends & colleagues that you’ve given the article to, requesting positive comments that you can include.
These testimonials reinforce that the reader is going to get something valuable if they turn over their email address in order to get it and, of course, a form to enter their email address to get access to the content. Always make sure that you tell people they can unsubscribe at any time.
In Part 2, I’ll give some specific examples that you can use as ethical bribes in your marketing efforts!
Mark Bullock
Telephone: (631) 754-0800
Email:Mark@phoneBlogger.net
Website:phoneBlogger.net
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